A central goal of the organizers and producers of a live event, such as a concert, is to get the content of the live event distributed to a wide audience. Aside from assuring sufficient financial compensation to make the live event commercially feasible, the most fundamental measure of the success of the live event is how many people participated in, viewed, or listened to the live event. In this vein, a live event heard or viewed by 10,000 or 100,000 people is generally considered more successful than one that is heard or viewed by one hundred or fewer people.
Ever since the advent of radio and later television, live event broadcasting has extended the audience of live events beyond those who are physically present at the live event. While radio and television broadcasting has proven adequate in many instances, they also have drawbacks. Radio lacks the visual aspect, and thus fails to draw participants into the live event in the manner that television can. Television, on the other hand, while visually compelling, is expensive for both the organizers and producers of the live event, who must pay royalty fees, access fees, or other types of fees to television broadcasters, and the viewers, who typically must pay subscription fees for anything beyond the most limited set of television signals that are broadcasted without scrambling. Television broadcasting is further disadvantaged by the expense and bulk of the equipment that must be used at the live event to actually broadcast the signal.
The advent of the Internet has led to a third possible way of distributing live events. There are now a huge range of Internet connected devices available which are capable of high quality video playback. These include laptops and home media centers, smartphones such as the APPLE iPHONE, Blueray devices and gaming consoles. These devices are typically connected to un-managed access networks such as 3G, home networks and WiFi hot spots. In accordance with the Internet distribution approach, cameras and microphones can be used to record the live event. These video and audio signals can then be encoded by any of a number of codecs and distributed on the Internet. While this approach in theory is attractive, a number of drawbacks are inherent to this approach. First, this approach assumes that there is a distribution server hard wired to the live event venue. This is typically not the case. In typical instances, the most that organizers and producers of a live event can rely upon at the live event venue is a stable source of power and light. Thus, if distribution of the live event over the Internet is desired, a satellite uplink is required. The cost for such a satellite uplink is decreasing on a daily basis and thus this drawback to Internet access is dissipating. However, a much more significant drawback with Internet distribution is beginning to unfold as users migrate from use of desktops, which are hardwired to the Internet, to portable devices that communicate with the Internet using wireless communication protocols at constantly varying signal strengths. Because of these constantly varying signal strengths, conventional Internet broadcasts of live events will typically be unsatisfactory. If a high resolution bitrate is selected for encoding the live event, users having low signal strength will incur unreasonable pauses as they wait for the live event to stream onto their mobile device. If a low resolution bitrate is selected for encoding the live event, users, regardless of their signal strength quality, will at best view a grainy low resolution video feed of the live event, with tinny or otherwise inadequate sound. Moreover, consider the case in which a user is traveling and thus, at some points in time has a high bandwidth connection, whereas at other times has a low bandwidth connection. In such instance, neither the low nor the high resolution bitrate is suitable all the time. At least some of the time the resolution of the video feed will not be suboptimal or will take too long to download, leading to pauses and destroying any appreciation for the live event.
Given the above background, what is needed in the art are systems and methods for distributing high quality video and audio feed of live events over the Internet in a cost effective manner using portable equipment that relies solely on the resources that can be expected at a live event venue.